Tag Archive: community

I’ve been remiss in posting and I know that. I’m taking a bit of a break from the godless stuff for a while. This dumbfuckery with/from Freethought Blogs and Thundrerf00t have put me off. I’m surprised how much it’s affected me considering how I’ve essentially got nothing to do with the ‘community’.

I am ambivalent about Thunderf00t releasing info from a private mailing list that he was legitimately added. I’m disappointed by what was released. Maybe disgusted. I don’t know.

That Matt Dillahunty is chiming in as well disappoints me. I’m fucking over this shit. I’ve un-followed a bunch of people who’s opinions I used to enjoy. I’ve stopped reading blogs I previously read… religiously. I’m not watching the video’s I used to.

I’m a bit disillusioned about the atheist/skeptical community at the moment. Perhaps it was overdue; I probably had unreasonably high expectations of people to begin with.

As it turns out, everybody is the same. Most people are assholes, even godless liberals. The only thing this ongoing drama has taught me is this: be more sceptical of everybody – they are probably worse people than you think.

I’ll post again when some religionut pisses me off enough or if some awesome science inspires me.

Like this:

It is pretty hard to argue that religion must be good for something to people personally, must have some kind of attraction that has kept many millions of people from walking away from it. As much as religionists like to believe their fairy tales are true and the Bible is chock full of truth and good stuff, the opposite is abundantly clear to anybody who doesn’t happen to have a vested interest in believing what religion is selling. The number of unbelieving clergy and “in the closet atheists” that preach or attend church is testament to the fact that there must be another attraction aside from the obvious.

What then is the draw of religion? Why are people so attracted to it and once in religion, why is it so hard to leave?

The results basically show that about a third of religious people who attended services weekly report being “extremely satisfied” lives had 3 to 5 close friends in the congregation. “Extremely satisfied” is defined as a 10 on a scale ranging from 1 to 10.

Only 19 percent of regular service attendees with no close friends in the congregation reported being “extremely satisfied” with their lives. On the other hand, 23 percent of people who only attend a handful of services per year but that have 3 to 5 close friends in the congregation reported being “extremely satisfied”.

“To me, the evidence substantiates that it is not really going to church and listening to sermons or praying that makes people happier, but making church-based friends and building intimate social networks there,” Lim said.

So, essentially, it’s your friends at church that makes you happy, not being at church, worshipping or praying.

When I look at myself I think I recognise that as the reason it was mostly painless for me to embrace atheism and feel very little discomfort at walking away from the religion of my parents. I didn’t have any close friends in any congregation and didn’t have any real social ties to stop me from leaving or make me want to go back.

I also think a lot of atheists are like me in that we don’t have or want extended social networks and mostly get on quite well on our own. It’s this that makes organising atheists like ‘herding cats’. The lack of a strong desire to be social made it easy for us to leave religion but hard for us to form a cohesive, working atheist “community”. In quotes because there is a bit a “movement” of atheist bloggers, activists and people who frequent the same forums, sites and groups together with secular campus organisations but nothing on the scale of a major religion.

Atheism has causes: maintaining the separation of church and state is one, the teaching of science fact instead of religious fiction in schools is another. Atheism and its causes has much to gain from a united organised community able to advance it’s aims in an organised, united way.

It might sound a bit ridiculous to say that we atheists should start to think of and treat our “community” like a religion but it seems that it might just be a good thing both for us personally as well as for the rest of world at large.